


Holo Projection

by obsession_inc



Category: Star Trek XI
Genre: Gen, Improv
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-10-14
Updated: 2009-10-14
Packaged: 2017-10-03 04:31:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/obsession_inc/pseuds/obsession_inc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The name is Tom. Cha'an Tom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Holo Projection

**Author's Note:**

> Improv!fic, where the rules are as follows: someone gives the author five elements to base a story on, and two hours to write it. Elements are listed at the end of the story. This hasn't been beta'd, in the spirit of the game, so any mistakes are mine and mine alone.

"I'm thinking," Gaila says, propping her feet up against a tree, "about being a spy."

Nyota makes a humming noise, not quite agreement, just sort of acknowledgement. She's sun-drenched and drowsy, stretched out in the grass, pondering little besides the way she can still see the too-rare noontime sunlight glowing through her closed eyelids, and the distant sound of voices where the cadets are going to their next class across the quad. She catches a few words of badly-mangled Andorian, and someone grumpily replying _no, it's just not the same without the antennae lift_. "Spy," she repeats, rolling the word around on her tongue like she could pick up Gaila's meaning from the taste of it. "You mean for a career path, or just in general?"

"Just in general. It seems interesting."

"Good, because I'm pretty sure there are a number of regulations against that sort of thing." Nyota rolls over and props herself up on an elbow, pulling her thermobottle of iced tea out of her bag. "So what brings this on? Did your history class go through the major intra-Terran wars already?"

"No, that's next week." Gaila lifts her feet away from the tree, one at a time, letting them thunk back into place one after the other, then again, in an irregular rhythm. Nine-eight time, switching to three-quarter time for a measure and then back; Nyota recognizes the pattern as a song from Gaila's childhood, one she tends to hum when she's under stress. "I get the concept, I think; a soldier goes among the enemy, posing as a civilian, and fucks people to get information."

Nyota chokes on a sip of tea and sits up, coughing hard. "You learned this in _class?_" she sputters.

"Next _week_, I said. No, this is from an old colonist holo some of the guys were showing on a cube they rigged up behind the xenolinguistics lab. They said it was an updated version of an old Terran movie trope." She tips her head back and squints upside-down at Nyota, ringlets of hair glowing copper against the grass. "I thought you'd recognize it. _Tom, Cha'an Tom_," she intones in a terrible North-Euro Anglish accent, and twists her head to one side, looking hopeful. "Right?"

"I've heard of it," Nyota says, laughing, "but I think you may be a little confused on the methods Cha'an Tom uses to extract information."

"No, I'm pretty sure of this, she fucks them and they give her information. Jim said it was the same way in the old 2-D versions."

"I'd take Kirk's version of that with a grain of salt."

"As food seasoning, or is this the idiom about distrust?"

"Idiom, but it indicates more skepticism than distrust."

"Hmph." Gaila looks back up into the tree and starts kicking in that Orion rhythm again. A squirrel chitters at her from above, apparently irritated by the disturbance; Gaila bares her teeth and chitters viciously right back, frightening the squirrel into disappearing into the branches. "Is Cha'an Tom supposed to be the hero?" she asks suddenly. "I recognized the high-speed chase scenes and witty remarks under duress from the Terran action-hero festival last year, but..." She sighs, twirling one finger off to the side of her head in a way that means _crazy_ in OldNorthAm body language, but means _I'm not sure_ for an Orion. "I don't know. She seemed sad."

Nyota used to watch Cha'an Tom holos with her cousins, at holidays back when they were young and their parents would stay outside talking until all hours of the night under the stars. She remembers a fast gun, a cool smile, a long braid of dark hair; she doesn't remember Cha'an Tom ever seeming sad. "I don't know what you mean," she admits. "I didn't catch that."

Gaila frowns, still staring up into the tree. "She's alone, without her people, among strangers who don't know who she is," she says. "She doesn't even fuck honest-- there's pleasure, and the men seem happy enough, but she's still trying to catch data, still trying to pose as someone else. Sad," she repeats distantly.

"Oh." Nyota gets it, and almost wishes she hadn't. She takes another sip of her iced tea, staring across the quad to where a few of the medical-track cadets are walking toward the dorms, one in blue hospital scrubs, one in red, and one in lavender. "She's just doing what she needs to do, for her people," she offers at last. "She saves lives."

"I know," Gaila sighs. "I just wish she could do it as herself. I like her." She makes a _ppphht_ noise, the one Nyota has learned means _it is ridiculous, and I don't approve, but it's still there anyway_, and rolls over onto her hands and knees, arching her back like a cat. "Well. As Cha'an Tom says, the scents are changed."

Nyota turns slowly and gives her a look, trying to parse this one. "The _what?_"

"The scents are changed," Gaila repeats, rolling her eyes as she sits up and stretches her arms over her head. "Are you sure you've seen _Dark Matter_? She says it four or five times in just the one holo. I thought it was a pretty smart turn of phrase for a species that usually ignores pheromonal interaction."

It takes a moment, but then Nyota remembers her cousins running around pretending to shoot each other with old-style projectile guns, yelling Cha'an Tom's catch phrase at each other. "No, that's not-- she says _ten cents in change_."

"Ten scents?"

"Cents, C-E-N-T-S, they're fractions of a single credit in the old system."

Gaila stares at her, bewildered. "What does that even mean?" she demands.

Nyota gestures helplessly. "It's just what she says when she wins a fight, I think it has something to do with making their lives sound cheap, like she doesn't care."

"That's _terrible_." The look of puzzlement on Gaila's face slowly ramps up to pure horror. "I thought-- you means she's not honoring her fallen enemies? She's treating them as if they weren't even worth beating? What's the point of that?"

"Being casual about killing is another traditional action-hero trait," Nyota explains, feeling worse all the time. "It's pretty common in pre-Enlightenment colonial attitudes."

Gaila makes the _ppphht_ noise again and collapses into a sitting position next to Nyota, shaking her head. "Patriarchal societies are so childish," she grumbles, a plaintive tone in her voice. "I like my version of Cha'an Tom better."

"Honey," Nyota says kindly, bumping her shoulder against her friend's, "so do I."

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not even sure what happened here, except that I was reading OS Trek novels by Diane Duane all weekend and so that's where I went, in spite of the fact that two of the prompt elements were way, way outdated by the century in question. I hammered them into place anyway, which seems to have made the whole thing go whackadoo on me. Went slightly over, as per usual: 8:49 PM - 10:54 PM. Written in response to a prompt by [](http://dafnap.livejournal.com/profile)[**dafnap**](http://dafnap.livejournal.com/): "iced tea, hospital scrubs, a testy squirrel, ten cents in change, and a dodgy British accent".
> 
> The weirdest thing is that now I really, really want genderfucked James Bond (albeit space-colonial, multi-ethnic genderfucked James Bond). I'm not sure I'm up to writing it, but damn, do I want it.


End file.
